Groom misses wedding reception due to tumor mistaken for migraine

Missing his wedding day is more than a headache – but the migraine that ruined this groom’s reception turned out to be much more serious.

Nathan Vaughan had no choice but to miss his wedding reception in May after marrying now-wife Katie Vaughan, née Glass, due to a “painful” migraine, spending the evening “lost” in his hotel room in Cambridgeshire instead of celebrating his wedding.

While he initially dismissed the headache as pre-wedding jitters, it persisted for three days and resulted in a trip to the emergency room, where he was diagnosed with a brain tumor that required surgery.

“I took painkillers, migraine tablets and assumed it was wedding day nerves, feeling the pressure a bit. But it wouldn’t change and it got progressively worse during the day,” Nathan, 30, told Kennedy News, adding that by 2 a.m. the morning of his wedding, he was “fine.”

“[For it to be] wedding day of all days, it’s crazy.”

Even the photographer noticed that the groom looked “a bit upset” and Nathan eventually retired to his bed while experiencing “the worst headache of my life”.

“I was thinking ‘I’m never going to live this down,'” he recalled.

My first thought was ‘my wife is alone on our wedding day’. I’m lying up there wrapped in guilt for leaving him alone.”

But Katie, 26, “did brilliantly” and “held the reception” on her own, despite being “gutted” that her new husband was ill on their wedding night.

“I told the kitchen ‘you can cut the cake too’ and I was just going to get on with it,” she recalled. “My father did a dance with me at the end of the night, bless him.”

But three days later, the pain persisted and Katie rushed Nathan to hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with a benign tumor on his pituitary gland, which they described as the size of two photographs.

“There is bleeding in the morning [of my wedding] so I’m bleeding in the brain,” he explained, adding that it required a four-hour operation to remove it because it was pushing on his optic nerve and affecting his vision.

“I don’t think Katie realized how soon after she said ‘in sickness and in health’ she was going to take care of me. It’s a long recovery process.”

While the couple are grateful things could have been worse but weren’t, they have issued a warning about the little-known symptoms of a brain tumor that easily mimicked a migraine.

“I can imagine that a lot of people will put it in a headache and not think to really look at it,” Nathan said, explaining that many people can have it their whole life and not know it.

“If it had happened the day before, the wedding wouldn’t have gone ahead and if it had happened the day after, I would have had a hangover from drinking and probably wouldn’t have considered it.”

Luckily, the couple had no plans for an immediate honeymoon, or that too would have been cut short by the tumor. Instead, they’ll be heading to Kos, Greece, next year where they’ll see “blue skies, beaches and hopefully no migraines.”

“It was a weird time,” Katie said, recalling her big day. “I like looking at the pictures, but at the same time it was a really weird day. Not what I imagined for my wedding day.”

While Nathan is “grateful” to see his “wife walk down the aisle,” the couple is redoing their one-year wedding anniversary reception and inviting all their guests to celebrate once again.

“I do our first dance a year later and I do my speech and cake cutting,” Nathan said. “Better late than never.”